I’ve been using Steam Remote Play to stream games from my desktop back home to my laptop while I’m living abroad.
And by abroad, I mean a different continent.
Before anyone says that’s insane, it actually worked pretty well for about 40 days. Not perfect, obviously, but perfectly playable for the games I use it for.
Then a couple of days ago everything went downhill.
The image is constantly blocky, even when I’m not moving. As soon as I move the camera, it gets much worse.
There’s also this really annoying rhythm to the stuttering. Every few seconds the stream freezes for a moment, then continues, then freezes again.
Happens in every game.
I saw that Steam recently updated some Remote Play stuff, so naturally I’m blaming Valve until proven otherwise.
Anyone else seeing this?
You’re streaming video in real time between two continents. I’d be looking at the network path before assuming Steam broke something.
Are you on WiFi at the laptop end? I’d check that before diving into Steam settings. NetSpot can show your signal level, band, and nearby WiFi channels, so you can rule out an obviously weak or badly placed local connection. But it won’t tell you what’s happening between the two countries. Best test would be Ethernet at both ends, even temporarily.
@Repulsive_Trade303 Laptop is on 5 GHz WiFi. The desktop back home is wired. I can probably plug the laptop in for testing, although it’s not convenient.
Definitely worth doing once. If the problem is identical over Ethernet, there’s little reason to spend the evening rearranging WiFi channels.
Turn on Steam’s detailed streaming performance overlay. You need to know whether you’re dropping frames because of network conditions or because encoding/decoding is struggling. Pixelation during motion could be the stream getting compressed more aggressively under bandwidth pressure. The regular hiccups are a separate clue. They might be network-related, but I’d want to see the stats. GHz when reception is poor might make things worse. And make sure you’re testing latency to your local gateway, not just running internet speed tests.
@Responsible_Jump35 I didn’t realize Steam had a detailed overlay. I’ll check it tonight.